Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 20, 1993 TAG: 9304200014
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WARSAW, POLAND LENGTH: Medium
"The struggle we put up half a century ago in Warsaw reminds me of what is going on now in the former Yugoslavia. The main analogy is the passiveness of the world," Marek Edelman told the Zycie Warszawy newspaper.
Even in the United States, the lessons made be fading. A third of Americans are open to the possibility that the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews, never happened, a survey released Monday found.
Twenty-two percent of respondents to the Roper Organization survey said it seems possible the Holocaust never happened, and 12 percent said they did not know if it was possible or impossible, the American Jewish Committee said.
The findings shocked Holocaust survivors, some of whom have devoted much of their lives to keeping alive the memory of the systematic extermination of Jews during World War II.
"What have we done? We have been working for years and years," said a stunned Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate who chronicled his experiences at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
"I am shocked that 22 percent . . . oh my God."
In Warsaw, Israeli President Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Polish President Lech Walesa led the commemoration of the uprising.
But the official events were only a backdrop to the excruciating memories, miracles of survival and hope for future generations offered by the Jewish ghetto survivors returning from around the world.
"Most of my family was killed during the uprising and their memory is precious to me," said Australian Boris Kaplon. "That is why I came."
"No words can explain," said Walter Cykiert of Detroit, seeing for the first time since World War II the place where his three brothers and two sisters died. He escaped the uprising to the shelter of a Catholic woman and spent weeks in a closet.
As day dawned 50 years ago Monday, German soldiers surrounding the barbed-wire and brick walls of the Jewish ghetto prepared for its final liquidation. Instead, within hours, a pitched battle was under way, the first armed civilian uprising against the Nazi occupiers in Europe.
The courage of those 1,000 or so Jewish fighters who held out against the German tanks for nearly a month in the name of 400,000 Warsaw Jews already murdered and another 40,000 condemned was honored Monday.
Rabin stood solemnly atop the bunker that became a grave for the leaders of the rebellion and he saw Umschlagplatz, the railroad siding where the Nazis crammed the Jews aboard trains to death camps.
"We cannot forget the past but at the same time we look forward to a better world, to better relations between people, for the elimination of the remnants of fascism, Nazism and racist movements," Rabin said.
Jewish delegations from New Zealand to Canada built a mountain of wreaths at the base of the monument to the ghetto heroes, constructed within the precincts of the former ghetto from polished granite ordered by Hitler to celebrate German victory.
"We could not fail to come," said 23-year-old Igor Longvisnki, a Ukrainian Jew. "The Jewish tragedy is a universal message for all humanity: Never again."
One survivor who tried to alert a disbelieving world was remembered in a monument of cracked black marble unveiled Monday. Szmul Zygielbojm escaped from the ghetto to London but committed suicide in 1943 in a last bid to break Allied "indifference."
With only light arms, homemade grenades and the courage of the doomed, the fighters, most aged 15 to 25, forced the Germans into house-to-house combat. The uprising was a turning point for Jewish response to attack that now echoes in the Middle East.
In the end, about 7,000 died in the uprising, many framed against billowing smoke jumping from windows as the Germans fanned an inferno. Most of the uprising leaders committed suicide in their surrounded bunker on May 8, 1943, with a few escaping through sewers.
The last 40,000 Jews in the ghetto were deported, bringing the death toll to more than 400,000 from Warsaw, which had had the largest prewar Jewish community in Europe. In all, 3 million of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were from Poland.
The uprising's anniversary has been given special significance in newly democratic Poland, still confronting anti-Semitism even with only a few hundred practicing Jews among 38 million Catholics.
A year of exhibits, films and discussions are being offered to promote reconciliation between the Catholics and Jews who shared the country with a complex mix of acceptance and hostility for 1,000 years.
by CNB